Chippewa Valley Technical College

Uh, he is the owner of MRS Machine, and he was kind enough to send us a T-shirt and chocolate bars last time.

A board member of the Chippewa Economic Development Corporation, a board member of the Chippewa Valley Technical College, NCAA Division III football official underneath contract, and an all-around advocate for the industry.

Matt Guse, thank you for coming back to the show.

We appreciate you to be here.

But, uh, they will be debating Derrick Van Orden and Rebecca Cook.

I say debate, it's being framed as a candidate forum coming up, uh, at Chippewa Valley Technical College later this month.

But it's two candidates from differing sides of the aisle discussing the economy, and there will be moderators for this candidate forum.

So if it looks like a debate and smells like a debate, it will turn into a debate.

Yes, the Badger Crop Update Meeting will be, again, we're a little bit out, but two months away, so it's coming fast.

December 2nd, we'll be at the Chippewa Valley Technical College again.

That's an all-day program.

Starts, I think, about 8 o'clock registration.

And so we've helped businesses understand what does an internship look like? How does it help you? And it's going to continue to grow as ours has over the last 10 years.

And that is something I hope that the chamber in the future and UWEC and CVTC can continue developing is how do we do more of those things? I just think it's critical to have those two, our strong partnerships with CVTC and UWEC to show our community the quality of students we have here.

Because as we look at our workforce, we know the state of Wisconsin over 25 years is going to lose population.

72 counties, 62 are going to shrink.

So if we want to build our population and we want to build our workforce, we need to do everything we can to convince more students from both colleges to stay here after graduation.

I believe in the last survey for UWC, I think it's the high 30%, 37, 38, somewhere in there, are now staying here after graduation.

CVTC has similar numbers.

So it's about doing what we can do to convince students to stay.

Um, so I know we have a project manager that the city of River Falls, um, will help, uh, create a Gantt chart and things like that.

We formed our in- internal committee of, uh, uh, a mix of the St. Croix Valley Business Innovation Center board members and the River Falls Economic Development Center board members, and some of those are the university and CVTC.

Mm.

So it's kind of a, all of our own, you know, the stakeholders within that just to start working on kind of next steps.